During a 26-year naval career, one of my tours of duty brought me to the Washington DC area. It was around this time that I married and brought my new bride there to start our life’s journey together. She is an operating room nurse and eventually took a  department manager position at one of the largest metropolitan hospitals in the area in  the mid-1990s. 

Her hospital’s management team scheduled an offsite conference for all department  managers, which included a Color Code workshop facilitated by Dr. Taylor Hartman. At  the conclusion of the workshop, she and her colleagues were amazed at how accurately the descriptions of their personality colors reflected them. My wife decided that she wanted to answer her suspicions of what my personality color, including my driving core motive, was. At the workshop, she purchased a copy of The Color Code and had Dr. Hartman include a personalized inscription. At the time, I was deployed, but shortly after I returned home, she presented me with the book and said, “Read it! Then do the assessment.” 

Well, as a practitioner of the philosophy, “A happy wife is a happy life,” I immediately followed her directive. Upon learning of my results, she cracked a smirk and said, “I  knew it! You are a Yellow.” Not only am I a Yellow personality, but pretty much a purist. My driving core motive is “fun.” After that, we administered the assessment to all our immediate family and close friends. I must admit that there were some surprises for us, but we found that for the most part, we recognized many of the traits as described. This knowledge has helped us frame conversations and sometimes difficult discussions with a knowledge of how the other person may receive the information and has proven a valuable tool in relationships with our family and friends. It’s exciting to learn about your strengths and quite humbling and cathartic to recognize your limitations. 

Since retiring from the Navy, I now work as a project team development facilitator for  aircraft carriers and submarines as they prepare to enter the shipyard for extended  maintenance periods. My team brings together stakeholders responsible for performing  maintenance and modernization on these national assets to support the project team in developing communication skills and relationships that provide the foundation of a high-performing team. We conduct a series of workshops, exercises and team-building activities to achieve that goal. 

As I prepared a program for one of my project teams, the project supervisor told me that in the past, they had done assessments such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and StrengthsFinder and was specifically looking for something to help team members better understand each other and improve communication among team members. I remembered how Color Code improved our immediate circle and approached my supervisor about becoming a Color Code facilitator to provide that service for our teams. She approved, and I was off to the races. 

I had the team do the assessment prior to our week-long conference and conducted the  workshop on the first day. I was able to weave in the content during the remainder of the week to illustrate the characteristics of their DCMs (Driving Core Motives). One of the products I provided my team with at the conclusion of the conference was a contact roster of the attendees. During the closing remarks, the project supervisor requested that I include each of their primary and secondary colors, so that when they returned to the shipyard, they could refer back to their colors and use that as a tool to improve communication among the team. 

Since then, my facilitation team has increased our facilitator numbers and has executed many workshops for all the public and private shipyards on both the east and west coasts performing maintenance for the U.S. Navy. Color Code is proving a great tool in helping develop high-performing teams.

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Originally from the San Francisco Bay area, Mark Eller joined the US Navy at 17 and proudly served on submarines and surface ships during his 26-year career. After retiring from the Navy, he and his wife cruised on their sailboat for 2 years before settling in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. Presently, Mark is a project team development facilitator, working with submarines and aircraft carriers as they prepare for extended shipyard maintenance availabilities. His team works with project stakeholders to improve communication, building high-performing teams to efficiently deliver these national assets back to the navy and out to conduct our nation’s business around the world. They use the Color Code personality assessment to help their teams better understand each other by improving communication and cooperation ,resulting in a more efficient and harmonious work environment. Mark is almost a purist Yellow personality.